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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8266669" data-attributes="member: 42582">To use Forge terminology, I'm referring to all the techniques and associated mechanics that support purist-for-system resolution: keeping track of time; keeping track of rations; keeping track of encumbrance; keeping track of location in map-and-key terms. In games like AD&D, 3E D&D, RM, RQ and (to some extent) 5e D&D this interacts with all sorts of effect durations and all sorts of recovery schedules.In practice there is often a lot of handwaving of this stuff, but that opens the door to "railroading" or at least GM Force applied outside the notional system parameters (eg the GM "just decides" that by the time the NPCs catch up and attack the duration of the protection spell cast at the start of the day has already expired). But keeping track of it shifts the focus of play away from "story now" or even "story anytime at all" to all those minutiae. As well as the actual focus of time spent at the table, it is also an obstacle to the use of certain techniques: story now GMing often uses fairly strong scene-framing; but in (eg) Rolemaster it's almost impossible to bring any scene to a definitive close because there is probably some ongoing effect or ongoing consequence that mandates keeping track of the passage of time. And even non-scene-framed Story Now approaches like (say) Apocalypse World still rely on the GM to be flexible in the narration of the passage of time (eg a Defy Danger or Act Under Fire might be a moment's action, or a night spent hiding from enemies who are searching for you.Another way to put it that has just occurred to me: in AW/DW the passage of time is (basically) just colour. Likewise in Prince Valiant. Whereas in Rolemaster it is anything but, and the ways in which the resolution mechanics engage it, and countless similar points of minutiae, can inhibit story now much of the time.I think I've addressed most of this above. I'm not surprised by your question about euphemism, but I was thinking that even beyond gamism you can get into stuff that is much like the techniques of wargame play: making lists of gear, managing dispositions of forces, logistics and the tracking of resources, etc. Again my main lived experience of this is the RM context but I can easily extrapolate from that to RQ or AD&D.The flipside of that is my Prince Valiant game, where the players - whose PCs are leaders of a warband - are always threatening to detour us into that sort of stuff but I do my best to pull us away from it! There are various features of Prince Valiant that make that possible, but here's just one of them: in warband vs warband combat the rules tell us who wins, but don't allocate casualties. That's up to me as GM. And the main determinant of who wins is the skill of the leader on each side - which for the PCs' warband is one of them! So the resolution framework doesn't in itself generate pressure to track all the details down to the last missing horseshoe on the last of the Hun auxiliaries' ponies - unlike (say) RM's War Law.</blockquote>

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